“Any news on Travis Watson?” I yelled to MacAvoy, as the rotors spun faster, and their noise increased from a throb in my temples to an actual headache.
“We found his limo,” said MacAvoy. “It had several bullet holes, but there wasn’t any blood. We found it abandoned in an alley beside an apartment building.”
“Did you search the building?” asked Hauser.
“I hope he’s someplace else,” said MacAvoy. “That was the first building the Unifieds attacked. My men sort of demolished it during the fighting.”
“Sounds like the Unifieds are looking for Watson as well,” Hauser observed.
“Maybe not anymore,” said MacAvoy. He looked at me and smiled. “Watson isn’t really the commander in chief with Harris around.” He turned in my direction, and added, “With any luck, they’ll go after you instead.”
Hauser nodded, and said, “Good thought.”
Seeing that Hauser was already nervous about touring the battlefield, I said, “Yeah, maybe we should let them know I’m on this gunship.”
“There’s no rush,” said Hauser. He didn’t like flying in a clumsy bird inside the atmosphere. He looked nervous and fidgeted. “If telling the Unifieds we’re on this ride brings them out of the sewers, I’m all for it,” said MacAvoy. “Hell, if it brings their asses out, I’ll attach a streamer that says ‘Vote for Harris.’”
The engines became louder as we lifted off. I could tell that Admiral Hauser was nervous by the way he jolted in his seat every time the gunship dropped or hiccuped. Trying to be heard over the engine, MacAvoy yelled, “The front is about six miles ahead of us. We’ve got them pinned down tight. That’s the good news.”
The side doors of the gunship hung open. Gunners sat beside the chain guns, ready to fire at anything that moved. The noise of the rotors thudded in my ears, making it hard to hear and harder to think. Below us, the city seemed to unfurl like a scroll, like a three-dimensional map with realistically rendered holographic buildings. The streets were empty.
Three fighters flashed past us. I didn’t know they’d been behind us or see them go by. They were hundreds of yards ahead of us by the time the thunder of their engines shook our ride. The gunship shivered in their wake, and I felt my stomach lurch into my chest.
Looking through an open door, I stared at geometric shapes that made up the skyline, skyscrapers and towers forming its lower edge, cutting into the sky like the ridges of a serrated blade. August in Washington and the sky was such a light blue that I almost dismissed it as white.
Somebody fired a rocket at us. They could only hit us with rockets, not missiles, because gunships transmitted radio waves and other distractions that baffled the computers on missiles. The problem with rockets was that they were no more intelligent than bullets. Missiles lock on to targets, often tracking their motion or their heat. Rockets simply fly in the direction that you point them; missiles make course corrections. But while missiles are more accurate, their brains make them vulnerable.
Thunk-a-thunk-a-thunk-a-thunk. The gunner to my right responded with his chain gun, firing rounds that could pierce a tank or a truck as if they were made of paper. When I was in boot camp, one of my drill sergeants fired a chain gun at a nearby hill, then he sent my platoon with shovels to dig out the slugs. That little task took all night. We had to dig more than twelve feet down before we finally found them.
That was the same kind of gun that Nailor and his soldiers had used to massacre the men I left guarding the ridge while I looked for Freeman. A bullet that can split armor and bury itself deep in the earth can cut a man in half. I reminded myself of that as I thought about the score I would soon settle.
“Did he get them?” asked Admiral Hauser.
MacAvoy shook his head. “They fire their rockets, then switch on their shielded armor. It takes more than armor-piercing bullets to kill those bastards. You either have to bury them or catch them with their shields down.
“So far we’re having more luck burying them.”
Off in the distance, I saw Sunny’s building, sticking out of the ground like an old-fashioned bayonet. It was tall and silver-gray, its tinted windows a perfect mirror of the sky. I pointed, and asked, “Have the residents been evacuated from that building?”
“Yes. We’ve evacuated everything west of 16th Street,” said MacAvoy.
That must have been a massive effort; it included a third of the city and a lot of high-priced real estate. You can’t just relocate rich people and politicians; you need to transport them someplace nice and send soldiers to patrol their neighborhoods for looters while they’re gone.
The sight of Sunny’s building, pointing like an accusing finger, unnerved me. I wanted to ignore it, tried to put it out of my mind, tried to put her out of my mind. I gave in. “Did you keep records of the people you moved and where you stashed them?” I asked.
“Sure, we did. And we treated them properly, too. No shitty relocation camps for these natural-borns. We placed them in hotels and houses outside of town.”
“And you kept records of who went where?” I asked.
“Sure,” said MacAvoy.
So I asked what I needed to ask, protocol be damned. I asked, “Is there a way I can check on someone you relocated?”
MacAvoy didn’t seem to hear me. He pressed the pointer finger of his right hand to his earpiece and stared out the open door to his left.
Seeing Sunny’s building, I felt the weight of my betrayal. She and I had never fought. We rode bikes together and went for long drives.
Bullshit, I told myself. The truth was that the only place Sunny and I fit together was in bed. We came from different worlds. I reminded myself that she and I had never belonged together. She didn’t like my friends and refused to introduce me to the people in her life. She always wanted to be alone with me . . . “wanted me to herself,” she would say. It got boring quickly. There were times that we made love because we’d run out of things to do.
Another rocket struck the gunship; this one hit low on the cockpit, causing the bird to buck. Apparently, Unified Authority Marines were no more capable of transporting heavy artillery underwater than we were. They seemed to have a good supply of handheld rockets, but I saw no tanks or jackals or missile batteries on the ground, not that I was looking. When the second rocket hit the gunship, I still had my eyes on the apartment building.
One of the gunners swung his chain gun, tracking the smoke trail from the rocket. He fired. The low thunk-a-thunk-a blended with the thud of the rotors, neither burying it nor being buried beneath it.
I wondered how soldiers could stand having a Military Occupational Specialty that kept them flying around in an airborne target, the grinding of the engines numbing their ears. The crew wore headsets, probably noise-canceling headsets. Maybe that was their secret. My MOS was infantry, all Marines specialized in infantry first, then we added other skills afterward.
I tapped MacAvoy on the shoulder. When he turned to look at me, I pointed toward the apartment building, and shouted, “There, that building. Is that behind enemy lines?”
He shook his head, and answered, “No. It’s on our side of the line.” He pointed out the door and two blocks ahead to a wide diagonal street. “There. That’s Massachusetts Avenue. That’s the line. Everything between Massachusetts and the river is theirs.”
“I need to know about someone who lives in that building,” I said, repeating the question that MacAvoy had ignored earlier. I pointed to Sunny’s building, and asked, “Is there some way to check?”
MacAvoy listened to me, thought about it, and yelled, “Yes.” He didn’t like my asking for favors, and that was exactly what I was doing, asking for a personal favor, but I didn’t care. I didn’t love Sunny, but I felt like maybe I owed her something. We’d shared moments, and I betrayed her. Betrayal is something we took seriously in the Marines.
Yelling to be heard above the rotors, I said, “The name is Sunny Ferris . . . Sunny spelled S-U-N-N-Y. That’s with a
‘U’ as in ‘uniform.’ Ferris . . . F-E-R-R-I-S.”
MacAvoy stared at me, his face implacable. Had I made him angry with my request? Had I shown weakness? Check that, I knew that I had. He stared at me, muttered something, but didn’t react.
Feeling like I had just made a fool of myself, I didn’t ask if he’d heard me. I sat there, worrying about Sunny, but it wasn’t Sunny I imagined as I studied the building on the edge of the war zone: It was Ava Gardner, Ava, who might have been my one true love or might have been the furthest thing from it.
The last time I’d seen Ava, she was lying on a bed, in an apartment, in a luxury condominium, on a planet called Providence Kri. We were evacuating the planet, but she begged me to leave her behind. She had given up. She no longer cared if she lived or died.
No, once again I was lying to myself. She cared. By that time, she’d seen so much death that life no longer mattered to her. She wanted to die. I kissed her one last time and said she could stay and die if she liked. She thanked me as I left. A few days later, the aliens incinerated the planet.
What if Sunny was still in that apartment building? What if she had missed the evacuation? Stupid as it sounded, even to me, I thought maybe I could make things right with Ava by rescuing Sunny.
At the moment, though, the gunship continued flying in the wrong direction. We cut through a splendid late-summer sky, hovering below lazy clouds and above a battered stretch of city.
Another trio of fighters screamed past us in silence. When the thunder of their engines finally caught up, it drowned out the noise of the rotors. I felt the vibrations of their wake, but it no longer bothered me.
“Harris, she’s not in our records,” said MacAvoy.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” said MacAvoy. “She could have been on vacation somewhere when we evacuated the area or she may have stayed in the building. Sometimes people refused to leave.
“At any rate, she’s not in our records. We didn’t move her.”
I looked back at Sunny’s building. I needed to go there. I needed . . .
MacAvoy interrupted my thoughts. He shouted, “There, Harris, ahead at ten o’clock.”
A column of maybe as many as fifty U.A. Marines moved through an alley between a couple of three-story buildings. They saw us coming. As they moved through the shadows, they switched on their shields. In the daylight and shadows, I noticed the change in color more than the glow of the shields. Their dark green armor turned brown under the orange glow of the shields.
Our pilot fired two rockets at the Unifieds as they raced between the buildings and out to the street. It was a world in reverse, this war with the Unifieds. Normally, soldiers ran for cover in battle; these bastards had to run away from it.
One of the buildings came down on the last third of the platoon burying ten or fifteen men. The bastards would have fired back at us, but the only weapons they could carry once their shields went up were the fléchette cannons attached to their sleeves. They might have been carrying rockets, but they would have dumped them in the alley before switching on their shields.
“Damn fine shooting,” MacAvoy said as he patted the pilot on his shoulder.
The Unifieds didn’t bother firing fléchettes at us; we were a couple hundred yards up and a quarter of a mile away. Their fléchette cannons didn’t hit shit after a few hundred feet, but men in shielded armor can afford to fight up close and personal.
I’d been trained for shoulder-fired rockets; they’re big, five or six times the size of an RPG and several times more powerful, and they weigh nearly thirty pounds. The bastards had fired two at us today, and we hadn’t been in the air for thirty minutes. How could they have smuggled so many rockets into town?
“You got any idea how many of those rockets they have?” I asked MacAvoy.
Hauser, looking nervous now that the rockets were in play, sat quietly watching us. War takes on a different meaning when you find yourself in the center of it.
My question clearly irritated MacAvoy. He asked, “How the speck would I know that?”
“They’ve fired two at us so far,” I said.
MacAvoy said, “Yeah, we call that ‘smooth sailing’ around here. Normally we’d have seen six or seven by now. They have hundreds of ’em.”
“Hundreds?” I asked.
He thought about it, and said, “Thousands.”
“Do they seem to be running out?” I asked.
MacAvoy shook his head, and said, “Maybe. They’ve only shot two at us so far; maybe things are looking up.”
Hauser, listening to us, exhaled sharply, making a dismissive-sounding, fruffing noise. He rolled his eyes, then went back to staring out at the ground.
I thought about the situation. Those rockets were heavy, they weren’t waterproof, and they were clumsy to carry. You couldn’t swim with them, not even if you had the SCUBA rigs the bastards who tried to kill me were wearing.
The Unifieds killed Don Cutter, attacked the prison, and tried to blow up the Pentagon all at the exact same moment, a coordinated strike. A lot of planning goes into that kind of staged assault. The brains behind these assaults wouldn’t make meticulous plans for one attack only to launch the next haphazardly. That wouldn’t make sense.
Say the Unifieds started smuggling rockets and armor into the city weeks or months ago, a luxury apartment building like Sunny’s would make an excellent munitions dump. It was big, protected by a civilian presence, and it had a transient population. People moved in, bringing their possessions in moving trucks that no one inspected. Stuff a dozen large apartments with rockets, and you’d have enough inventory to fight a fourth world war.
With MacAvoy flattening buildings in their part of town, hiding their armory in a neutral zone would make sense. I thought about Sunny’s building. Her neighbors were lawyers and senators and wealthy people, people with influence. Hell, MacAvoy had just complained that he couldn’t just relocate them; he’d had to place them in nicer billets.
No one in their right mind would search a building with such influential residents; you’d end your career.
CHAPTER
FIFTY-FOUR
We toured the front line from four hundred feet up, flying over empty streets and an abandoned waterfront. A few days ago, this area had been as elegant as any riverfront property on Earth. The pilot took us inland, flying over the Capitol; the Mall, with its museums and monuments; and rows of empty government office buildings.
No one had done any shooting around the Mall, not on our side or theirs. Talk about an abandoned city, Capitol Hill looked like it had been cleared using a neutron bomb.
I asked MacAvoy, “Remember that building I asked about when we were flying in?”
He said, “Yeah, the one you kept staring at. You have some scrub stashed in there or something? Was that the girl you asked about?”
When I didn’t answer, MacAvoy realized he had lit off a nerve and went silent.
“Can you drop me there?” I asked.
“Harris, if you’re pining over some gal, I’ll send you a battalion.”
Hauser, who hadn’t said more than a word or two the entire hour, chose this moment to speak up. He waved a hand, and said, “Don’t bother, General. Haven’t you heard about Harris? He can’t get his heart started in the morning without people shooting at him.”
“I heard you got shot a few weeks ago,” said MacAvoy. “Isn’t that why you went missing? You got gutshot?”
He was right, and I hadn’t fully recovered yet. I had a habit of pushing myself too far too quickly. Hauser was right as well; my M.O. included visiting front lines.
“Don’t worry about that. That was last week,” said Hauser. “This week, he’s storming underground caverns . . .”
“It was a mine shaft,” I said.
“. . . running one-man missions behind enemy lines . . .”
“Unless I am mistaken, the general just told us it was on our side of the fence.”<
br />
“. . . and you just mentioned the Cousteau undersea cities; are you planning on swimming down to the underwater cities as well?”
Visiting a Cousteau city was exactly what I planned to do though I wasn’t about to admit it. I wouldn’t actually swim down—no one could—but I planned to pay the Unifieds a visit.
And then some of the pieces of the puzzle collided together in my head. I had been abducted by the Unifieds on Mars. They captured me and my entire battalion. That much was known. We also knew that they tried to reprogram me. The scientists who designed the Liberators didn’t give us all of the neural switches they placed in the later models, so the Unifieds settled on brainwashing me instead. They managed to reprogram the rest of my men, though. They all converted to the other side.
And they changed sides at the worst possible time, right as the Unifieds launched an attack on Mars Spaceport. I suppose that was how the Unifieds had planned it.
After we won the battle, we searched the spaceport and Mars Air Force Base, looking for the labs in which the reprogramming had been done. We found nothing. It was as if the entire episode had been a dream.
It hadn’t been, though. When I returned to Earth, I had the ability to commit suicide, something that had originally been programmed out of me. Something else, I had a new phobia—a fear of the ocean. The very thought of traveling down to the Cousteau project had me terrified, with a deep-seated, paralyzing fear. When I looked into the dark blue water, I imagined giant squid and alien fish with sharp teeth and lantern scales. I imagined the fish at the bottom of the deepest trenches. I imagined the creatures that might live around an underwater city.
What if my indoctrination didn’t take place on Mars? I asked myself. Just because they’d captured us on Mars didn’t mean we’d stayed there. That would explain why we never found the lab. Maybe my newfound fear of swimming didn’t have anything to do with reprogramming; maybe it was an accidental by-product of being trapped at the bottom of the sea.
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